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Are you marketing to the right people? If you've created buyer personas and are now launching campaigns that appeal to those segments of people, you would know.
In this episode of the Weekly Marketing Cast, David Meerman Scott discusses how to create buyer personas and what steps you should take next.
What Is a Buyer Persona?
“A buyer persona is when you slice your marketplace into individual groups of people,” explains David. In other words, the term describes your target audience.
For instance, if you are a marketing manager at a hotel, you might have five buyer personas: an independent business traveler, a corporate travel manager, an event planner, a vacationing family, and a couple planning their wedding reception. When running marketing campaigns, you will need to adapt your messaging to fit the needs of these different buyer personas.
1. Interview Your Buyer Personas
“Once you identify who your buyer personas are, you need to interview those buyers,” advises David. Make sure the people you pick to talk to aren’t already your existing customers. Take 20-30 people who fit each persona and ask them open-ended questions that are not necessarily related to your product or services. “You want to end up with broad questions,” David says.
2. Create Profile(s) for the Persona(s)
Take the information you have gathered from your interviews and come up with a profile for each group. Give each of your personas a name and an image. If your business is a hotel, for instance, your buyer personas might include Wedding Wendy, for ladies planning their wedding receptions, and Business Traveler Ben, for corporate business professionals. Remembering about the needs of your different target audiences is so critical that some companies have placed images of their buyer personas throughout offices and on the walls of conference rooms.
3. How to Market to Buyer Personas
In order to effectively market to buyer personas, you will need to create content that targets these segments. For instance, for the newlyweds, you might have a blog that talks about wedding bands. The buyer personas are unique in what they need and how you market to them. Before you start a campaign, ask yourself, “What would Wedding Wendy say about this?” or “Would this piece of content appeal to Wedding Wendy?”
Buyer personas help your marketing come alive, says David. It’s so much better than merely talking about your products or services.
Do you use buyer personas in your marketing?
